Blue Moon Gallery launches summer season
The Blue Moon Gallery in Grayslake is launching its summer season with new exhibits this month loaded with sensational color, texture, and ideas from 6-9 p.m. on Saturday, June 24.
Three new guest artists are presenting paintings and assemblages on canvas. Frank Fitzgerald of Lindenhurst, a painter and educator, is showing a new collection of acrylic paintings featuring "fantastic fungi and fabulous florals."
Each piece features a vibrant color palette and a whimsical exploration of the architecture of fungi and flowers in the suburban landscape.
"For fungi and flowers, the process of growth and development begins under the soil in the dark," Fitzgerald said. "The corners of the suburban landscape can be peeled back to reveal fairy tale encounters of a chromatic symphony. These investigations mirror the psychological release that society can experience following a period of solitude and renewal ... My wish is that my artwork conveys feelings of great happiness and joyful excitement."
Mimi Peterson of Racine, Wisconsin, a visual artist, curator, poet, essayist, and art and humanities advocate, is presenting an eco-art series of painted assemblages on canvas featuring aerial views of imaginary terrains characterized by flat planes, undulating movement, and a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of color and deep shadows.
In her assemblages, forms and shapes created with wood, metal, and other found materials morph into hills and valleys as signs of people, places, seasons, and vegetation are absorbed by surrounding ecotones.
"Borders are drawn and redrawn - whether galactic systems, nations, or gerrymandering," Peterson said.
"Places are named and renamed, people immigrate. Such changes are often the result of world crisis, but instead of disappearing, pluralist societies are kept alive in today's hybrid art. My work has an affinity for chance and experiment as I search for some center of gravity."
Fitzgerald's and Peterson's exhibitions will be on view at the gallery through Aug. 6.
Guest pop-up artist Terry Luc of Northbrook will be exhibiting a collection of pop-art and modern cubism acrylic paintings in a special outdoor, one-night only pop-up show "on the bricks" during the gallery's June 24 opening reception, weather permitting.
Luc's compositions feature juxtapositions of iconic pop culture imagery with surrealistic settings. The result is vibrant, mysterious, color-saturated art that commands attention with its unique style.
"For me, art is rhythm, color, and beauty," Luc said. "It is never timid. It should grab you. Complementary colors should vibrate. You should be drawn in by graceful lines and 's' curves. It should feel like almost a musical experience."
Last month's guest artist, June Ambro of Kenosha, Wisconsin, continues offering her unique ceramic art at the gallery through July 6. Ambro creates two-dimensional and three-dimensional, functional pieces, and sculptural objects using clay as her main medium.
Her distinctive pottery features richly layered surfaces employing brush work, drawing, scratching, carving, slips, terra sigillata and glazes.
The gallery, 18620 Belvidere Road in Grayslake, will be also open to the public from 1-4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, including June 25. The gallery ships artwork to buyers nationwide.
The Blue Moon 2023 Collective Artists - John Kirkpatrick, Kathleen Heitmann, Michael Litewski, Juli Janovicz and Kendra Kett - will also be showing new and recent works this month. Their works span multiple mediums, including acrylic, oil, and watercolor paintings, wall-dependent and table top sculptures, graphite and colored pencil drawings, and more.
The Collective Artists, all local to Northern Illinois and Southeastern Wisconsin, feature florals and landscapes, figurative works, and still life and abstract compositions in their collections.
For information, contact Kendra Kett, director at Blue Moon Gallery, at (224) 388-7948 or visit thebluemoongallery.com.
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